Opinion: Editorials

From the Editorial Advisory Board: Boulder priorities

From left, new Boulder City Council members Jill Grano, Mirabai Nagle and Cindy Carlisle are sworn in Nov. 21. (Paul Aiken / Staff Photographer)

This week's topic: Boulder City Council will hold its annual retreat later this month to set priorities for 2018. What would you recommend?

Housing is an issue that affects tens of thousands of people in the Boulder area. I was a member of one of City Council's housing working groups a few years ago. Our input was ignored while council members patted themselves on the back for engaging Boulderites.

Boards are sometimes heard better, though most are advisory and council often throws their input out. I'm worried that the current City Council will fill its new housing board, then check off that box and make no progress regarding the housing challenges the city faces.

Housing is a priority. This council won't make it one.

What else is there?

Community engagement: A public participation working group's results were presented to the previous council. The current council needs to find time to listen to and incorporate their suggestions.

Houselessness: Last month, Mayor Suzanne Jones tweeted about "26 people w/unique stories&dreams" who died while unhoused in Boulder last year. I call upon the city to continue to work on decriminalizing houselessness and meeting the needs of its most vulnerable residents.

Transportation: Boulder is a member of Toward Vision Zero, a program attempting to eradicate deaths by vehicle. May the city work on implementation without allowing obstacles to hinder progress.

Municipalization: Municipal broadband will provide residents with no-longer-otherwise-available net neutrality. An electric utility will free us from the tyranny that is Xcel.

That's quite enough for a year of underpaid labor. Thank you, council members!

City Council should be a board of directors focused on providing policy direction, not a management team immersed in the city's day-to-day operations. Realistically balancing council's necessarily time-constrained priorities with a properly limited sense of its role in municipal governance should be Job One. All else should flow from this premise.

Council's highest priorities should be (1) fiscal accountability, (2) neighborhood and regional outreach, (3) civil discourse, and (4) generation of more hope, and less fear about Boulder's future. Which innovative city policies have stood the test of time? Which have suffered from a misunderstanding of economic factors that operate independent of — or from miscalculation of personal choices that actively defy — our feeble attempts at top-down, seemingly ubiquitous governmental control?

The challenges we face are regional in scope, but they are also often neighborhood-specific. Council needs to listen better, reach out to people who are often not heard, and find more effective ways to engage everyone in shaping our collective future. Our first priority should be relaxation of accessory dwelling unit restrictions that have prevented more widespread deployment of these owner-occupied, self-regulating, wealth-buttressing, and workforce housing-producing dwelling units within structures that already exist.

As a community, Boulder is blessed with compassionate hearts, creative minds and abundant resources. We can lead the way towards environmental sustainability, economic resilience, social justice and innovative housing/transit solutions. Starve the trivial. Feed the significant. Trust the good faith and well-informed instincts of Boulder's citizens.

As a member of the Downtown Boulder Partnership, I recommend that City Council consider the revenue, jobs and creative juice generated from downtown and work with the downtown community to keep it flowing.

Parking in downtown should not be moved from the Community Vitality Department, currently headed by Molly Winter — who, six months ago, was named 2017 Parking Professional of the Year by the International Parking Institute — to the Department of Transportation. Thanks to Molly and her staff, many of the parking issues in the garages have been fixed and things seem to be humming along.

The last thing we need is a big jump in parking fees in the misguided belief that the drivers will get on their bikes and come downtown anyway. They won't — and sales tax revenue will go down. A better solution would be to resurrect the d2d program that was tested a year ago with Uber and retailers providing vouchers to Uber riders who came downtown. That was a success and should be permanently implemented.

The Farmers Market is another big draw — it brings people downtown and is a necessary source of revenue for our local farmers. We should pursue a permanent spot for them year-round.

Finally, there should be a comprehensive plan for the Broadway corridor from the Hill to the Alpine-Balsam commercial district so it remains a viable commercial choice on the west side of the city as development moves eastward.

One danger of single-party rule is that, lacking the usual checks and balances of a more diverse political representation, spending can get out of control. In an excellent letter to the Camera appearing in the Oct. 20, 2017 edition, Richard J. Bowman pointed out that Boulder's city government has twice as many people on the payroll and a budget twice the size of a comparably-populated college town, Ann Arbor Mich. He asked, why? As far as I know, no city official has attempted to explain.

Oh sure, a couple of weak defenses were subsequently published, one penned by a chair of the Ann Arbor Bicycle Coordinating Committee, another by a former employee of Boulder's self-promoting Channel 8, but the question should be answered by City Manager Jane Brautigam. Maybe she's been too busy counting her latest performance bonus to get around to it.

Last year's council priorities included: homelessness, street safety, new taxes, development plans at two major city-owned sites and housing proposals. You could run that list through again and get the same results: more homelessness, threats of screwing up more traffic corridors, more ugly construction projects and more backyard rental properties. But this would be boring.

Beware the "sexy projects" that may grow out of this year's retreat, as those usually translate into obscenely expensive whimsical endeavors costing twice as much as they should and no one explaining why.

Boulder City Council has hundreds of things to consider, so I will focus on two. Council is already discussing election rules. Having always been one who gives more credence to the spirit of the law than the letter of the law, it bothers me that in the last election, groups supported candidates in what would have been illegal ways, had they used the terms "we support," instead of just showing photos of the candidates. That is not the spirit of the law. Also, if the council can influence redistricting, it would be great if Colorado would come up with a solution to gerrymandering, by either side.

A bigger issue for the council is the four projects in the "Broadway corridor," which will change the face of Boulder's main thoroughfare. These are: 3303 Broadway; Alpine-Balsam; Civic Area redevelopment; and the Hill. Many Boulderites would like these areas to remain as they are forever, but that is unrealistic. I would like the council to focus on market-rate inexpensive housing, possibly including small apartments, for 3303 Broadway and Alpine-Balsam. The Teahouse should be the focus of the eastern redevelopment piece of the Civic Area, with a Persian garden if it works. And, if there is a way to get a beautiful hotel on the Hill that would somehow be compatible with student hangouts, that would be ideal. And why not put in a chairlift from the Hill to the Civic Area?

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